Energy Service Interface: Accessing to Customer Energy Resources for Smart Grid Interoperation

The Energy Service Interface (ESI), sitting at the boundary of a customer facility, plays a communication gateway role - interconnecting internal customer energy resources to external systems. A number of customer energy services are realized over the interconnected communications, which then contributes to smart grid interoperation eventually. In this paper, we examine the design issues of the ESI. To facilitate bi-directional customer energy services, the ESI must serve as both a service consumer and a service provider. At the same time, it must protect the customer energy resources from external threats and maximize the interoperation. To verify the issues, we build and deploy two ESI testbeds. Throughout experiments with a couple of energy service scenarios, we verify that the ESI plays the service "prosumer" in an interoperable manner. We also evaluate the performance of the security mechanism applied to the ESI and examine the potential of exploiting the Cloud technology for the ESI deployment. To the best of authors\´ knowledge, this is the first deployment of the ESI that addresses the fundamental, functional requirements.